United States in 1996

Developments in Government

If the November elections underlined anything, it was that the American people were eager to pull back from extremes that might erode their sense of stability, however transitory that might prove to be. The nation had been badly shocked in 1995 by signs that the social and political consensus was fraying in ways not seen since the Vietnam War. In Washington the tension was symbolized by the trench warfare between the White House and Congress over the 1996 budget, which had left the government essentially inoperative. Some 280,000 government workers were laid off, and another half million were working but not being paid. At issue were the differing ways in which the two sides proposed to close the budget deficit over seven years, chiefly in terms of taxes and in slowing the growth of such huge entitlement programs as Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans wanted to cut $270 billion from Medicare growth, for example, while the president wanted to pare only $124 billion. Clinton had also rejected Republican efforts to give the military more than the $256 billion he had originally proposed.

The standoff, which had begun in mid-December 1995, continued for 18 days before the Republican wall began to crack. It was Clinton’s soon-to-be presidential rival, Senator Dole, who first urged his party to begin providing funds on a continuing basis so that the government could get back to work. He was then joined by Speaker Gingrich, who broke with more radical members of his party to do so. Both men realized that the American people, while sympathetic to the goal of cutting the size and scope of the government, were profoundly uneasy at its paralysis. After 21 days the funding cutoff ended on January 6, with both sides having submitted their proposals for seven-year reductions in spending. The squabbling over the actual 1996 budget continued until late April, however, with 13 separate temporary spending bills required for keeping the government functioning while the horse trading went on.

In general, the outcome of the exhausting battle confirmed the thinking that had propelled the congressional Republicans to power in 1994. In the final budget more than 200 federal programs were abolished, mostly in the Labor and the Health and Human Services departments. Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a longtime target of conservative ire, was slashed, though the corporation survived. So did such Clinton programs as the subsidized national service for youth, funding to put 100,000 extra police on the streets, and extra money to improve the quality of education, viewed by conservatives as a federal prop to a pillar of the Democratic Party, the National Education Association.

The president was quick to turn the situation to political advantage and to articulate the theme that was to dominate the electoral politics of the year. "The era of big government is over," he told Congress and the nation in his annual state of the union address. He added, however, that "we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves." Clearly positioning himself as a moderate, he called for such achievements as bipartisan welfare reform, an increase in the minimum wage, and portability of health insurance so that workers would not lose coverage if they changed jobs. He also asked for a line-item veto of the kind already wielded by 43 of 50 state governors and endorsed by the Republican congressional majority.

The limited nature of Clinton’s 1996 goals stood in sharp contrast to the grandiose first-term proposals he had outlined for health care reform, which died ignominiously in 1994. The fate of the new proposals was also different. In May Congress endorsed the first hike in the federally mandated minimum wage in five years, from $4.25 to $4.75 an hour, with another rise to $5.15 a year later. Some 3.7 million Americans were affected by the measure, most of them women. The change was fiercely opposed by small business lobbies, but in the end Republicans split over the issue.

At virtually the same time, Clinton won approval of the line-item veto, which allowed the president to strike a limited number of items from an appropriation bill rather than veto the entire document. The veto was highly limited, however. It applied to tax concessions only if they affected no more than 100 taxpayers and specifically could not be used on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Nor could it be used to block major tax reductions, and it could be overturned by a two-thirds congressional majority. Nonetheless, the veto was decried by Sen. Mark Hatfield, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of only three Senate Republicans to vote against it, as "the greatest effort to shift the balance of power to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the Supreme Court." The veto was immediately promised a constitutional challenge.

If the president was able to win incremental victories that gave solace to the liberal constituencies within his party, he also made moves that set him apart from them. None was more symbolic, or fraught with more sweeping potential to affect American society, than his decision to sign the welfare reform act passed by Congress, the first comprehensive overhaul of the system in over 60 years. Momentum for some sort of change was clearly unstoppable. In polls the American people had frequently showed their unhappiness with welfare, particularly the $16 billion program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Clinton had already declared his willingness to accept a two-year limit on recipients in the program, but liberal members of his party had long argued that a welfare cutoff was meaningless, and perhaps dangerous, unless it was matched with expensive job-creation measures, probably in the public sector. The Republican Congress would have none of that. In the long wrangle over the bill, the White House was able to add a number of palliatives to the notion of a welfare cutoff: child nutrition programs, extra aid for recession-hit states, and money for child care and foster care. The overall direction of reform, however, was to take the federal government out of the social welfare business where possible and to hand its administration over to the states.

Under the provisions of the measure, states were to receive block grants for all welfare expenditures, set in relation to 1996 levels, with added money to take account of recessions or unusual population growth. The act abolished the AFDC program entirely and gave the states until July 1, 1997, to come up with plans that required welfare recipients to go to work within two years, while setting a total limit on welfare assistance of five years per family. After six years states that failed to put welfare families in work of some kind would lose their federal funds, although 20% of a state’s caseload could be exempted. The law contained a number of clauses aimed at reinforcing the work ethic. Administrators could cut payments to teenage mothers who did not finish high school, for example, or who did not live with an adult (a response to frequent criticisms that the AFDC program encouraged broken families and illegitimacy). State legislatures would need to provide a waiver to add payments for children born while their mothers were on welfare. On the other side, the measure set aside $400 million in bonuses for states that reduced or contained rates of illegitimate birth, including $250 million for education in abstinence as a form of birth control. The bill also barred legal immigrants who had not applied for citizenship from receiving food stamps and other forms of assistance. The law recognized that many states had long been trying to find more workable formulas, and it gave 44 states a year to wind down various experiments already under way.

Some questioned whether this welfare reform was actually an answer to the problem or merely a means of shuffling the issue onto lower levels of government. Most experts agreed that without substantial levels of job training and placement, the two-year limit to federal funding might merely shift an immense burden onto state budgets. Many child-care advocates warned that the reforms would strike hardest at the children of those on welfare, perhaps adding millions to the rolls of a permanent underclass. Of course, the full impact of the welfare changes were not likely to be felt for several years, a point that was often made by its opponents, some of whom were closely aligned with the president’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. That, however, did not deter the president from signing the measure.

Clinton also took a variety of conservative postures on other social and so-called family-values issues, especially those related to crime and drugs. He appointed a four-star army general, Barry R. McCaffrey, previously commander of the Pentagon’s Southern Command in Panama, as the nation’s drug czar. He raised the possibility of a mandatory drug test for teenagers seeking to obtain a driver’s license. The president caused a fierce storm of protest among homosexuals when he announced his support for legislation that would ban the provision of federal benefits to the partners in a same-sex marriage. When the Defense of Marriage Act passed, Clinton signed it.

The issue of same-sex partnerships proved a heated one across the country in an election year. The immediate reason for the furor was a series of court decisions in Hawaii, reaching to the state’s Supreme Court, that ruled the prohibition of same-gender unions to be in violation of the state constitution’s equal protection clause. The decisions led to conservative warnings that the ruling would usher in homosexual marriages across the nation as states were forced to recognize their legality under the "full faith and credit" provisions of the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the likelihood of such legitimacy was small, for 15 states had laws explicitly banning such marriages, and others were considering them.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.